Challenges Facing Families with Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Autism spectrum disorders are life-long neurodevelopmental disabilities with onset before 36 months. Children with autism spectrum disorders show main deficits in three domains including: impairments in reciprocal social interactions, impairments in verbal and non-verbal communication skills, and stereotyped behaviors. These children cause enormous challenge for their families. Actually families of children with autism spectrum disorders are intensely affected by the multiple failures of their children, and these failures affect parents’ personality, marital relationship, parent-child relationship, and families’ other children. Moreover, these families experience intense stress, guilt, and shame. Present paper highlights the major challenges and difficulties which are faced by the families of children with autism disorder, such as stress, parenting problems, siblings’ problems, financial problems, and marital conflicts, and finally presents several strategies for the management of mentioned problems.